Youth workers in Australia pointed out on April 25th, 2011 that the giant supermarket Coles is inadvertently making it easy for local youth to obtain and abuse inhalants.

An inhalant abuse program manager reported that child protection workers have been finding empty cans of inhalants that young people have been sniffing. They tracked the cans back to Coles, where the shelves of the most commonly abused inhalants are practically empty.

The youth worker recommended that these inhalants should be placed at the front of the store, near alcohol and other controlled substances, where they can be watched more closely.

More broadly, supermarkets in general should keep this in mind in their layouts. Inhalants have become a hot item for theft as their broad-scale abuse continues to reach epidemic proportions.

Commonly abused inhalants include not only the chemicals from pressurized cans, but also such things as paint thinners, paints, and model glue.

Inhalant abuse is one of the most damaging forms of drug abuse because the toxins involved come into direct contact with the brain and nervous system almost immediately, with no mechanism in the body that effectively works as a filter. Some long-term inhalant abusers have been known to lose mental and physical control of themselves and become permanently disabled.